So you’re ready to release your electronic product but you’re stuck with all sorts of questions.

• How will you fulfill the order?
• How do you set up automatic digital product delivery?
• What would you need to use to do this?

The good news is, making products available for immediate download can be really simple especially if you’re not too concerned about securing the product. Once you throw controlled downloads and control circulation into the equation, things start getting complex. Let’s look at your options.

Thank You Page Delivery
This is probably the easiest and doesn’t require very much technical know-how at all. Any payment processor can send people to a thank you page after purchase. If you’re already publishing web pages, you know you can publish a simple link to the product for download on that page and you’re done. Ready to do business. Yes, it really is that simple.

There are a few problems with this method, though. For one, search engine spiders may pick it up and this is certainly one page you don’t want them to index. You can keep them away by creating a robots.txt file and disallowing robots from visiting the page but it’s still largely transparent. People can link to it, bookmark it or distribute the link to that page.

Autoresponder
This is probably the next best option for automatic digital product delivery. It’s just as easy to set up and requires little technical knowledge as well. The big idea is to create a special email address where order notifications will be sent to. Once the autoresponder receives the notification email it will trigger a reply email which includes information where to download the product. You can password protect the download page and send the login information in the autoresponder email or you can send the product as an attachment.

The downside, if you send the product as an attachment, it will have to be small enough for people to accept it. You’re also raising the chances of it being filtered by spam and firewalls. Even sending someone to a password protected page, sometimes people don’t receive the emails. For the most part, this is a seamless and automatic method to deliver your digital product. People online today are more aware of checking spam boxes for false positives and about white listing. You can expect some amount of “I did not receive the email” support tickets but the percentage will likely be small.

For digital product delivery with an autoresponder, Aweber is a good one to use. The system is intelligent and robust plus they have set up everything so you can easily integrate PayPal.

Digital Product Delivery With Membership Systems And Download Scripts
Although using the autoresponder is a better way to control distribution, people can still pass around that thank you email. If you’re really concerned about that, you can opt for a membership system where people create their own account and logins. You can also get a shopping cart and scripts that can generate a unique download link that will expire within the time frame you define.

These systems offer you the best download link protection but will add to the start up cost. So what is best? That will depend on how much money and time you have to set things up. Autoresponders are easy and very low cost. Even if you opt for a monthly service, it will probably cost you no more than $20 a month and you can use the service for other marketing purposes like building a list. If you use a script, you will have to factor in the price of the script, setting it up, testing it and maintaining it.

If you choose this method, I highly recommend aMember for membership systems. This is still the best membership manager I’ve come across. For protected downloads, try aMember. It can pretty much do everything from one-time digital product to memberships and affiliate solution.

Unlock Key
Keep in mind that unless every download of your product is protected by it’s own unique key, all the methods described above only protect the download process. Even though each option makes it a little harder, but once people get hold of the product, they can still share it. Creating executable files (.exe files) with password protection is a fine idea but not going to help either because people can still share passwords. Besides, executable files are always viewed as suspicious and people who aren’t using Windows won’t be able to open it.

If you’re really concerned about piracy and product sharing, there are services that can protect each downloaded copy with an unlock key. These services work with most major payment processors like PayPal and 2Checkout. Instead of sending them to your own thank you page, you send them to a special page that is generated for your product. The service will take care of the key code generation for you, everything is automatic and immediate. Two that I know of are Access Locker and ClickLocker. They cost $9.95 and $24.95 a month respectively.

As a final thought, people are largely honest and a handful will share your product no matter what you do. The truth is, the more restrictions you put in your customer’s way, the more resentful they will be. Trust goes both ways. It’s easier to build in some copyright clause and terms of download and take care of your good customers who will be your evangelists than to lose sleep over the few copies you’re not getting paid for. This does not mean you should make it easy for people to steal. Go with the best digital product delivery method you can afford and effectively use and worry less on what you can’t control.

Recommended Tools
aMember – Membership site manager
Aweber – Autoresponder & Email Newsletter Service